It was a funny thing, though, he recalled earlier this year, while taking time out from his recording schedule to talk to a visiting writer from Postmedia News: Neither did Blake Shelton, Adam Levine or any of the other professional music artists who, at the time, would unwittingly play a part in The Voice’s rapid rise to the top of the ratings charts.

As The Voice sets the stage for its fourth season with returning mentors Levine and Shelton and new mentors Shakira and Usher, replacing the departed Cee Lo Green and Christina Aguilera, Daly is calm yet tightly wound in anticipation of a season he believes will introduce a new audience to vocal performers they might otherwise never have heard.

Daly is quiet and soft-spoken as he talks about how The Voice has turned the music industry on its ear, but don’t mistake that vibe for casual detachedness. Daly, the 39-year-old host of the late-night talk show Last Call With Carson Daly and host of NBC’s annual celebration New Year’s Eve With Carson Daly, says he had little time “for those other shows” when he first heard about The Voice.

And that wasn’t all. The last thing Levine, the lead singer of Maroon 5, wanted or needed, Daly suggested, was to become a running punchline to a joke about reality TV singing competitions. And that went double for Shelton, the 2012 Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year; Aguilera, dubbed the “blue-eyed soul singer” and “voice of a generation”; and Green, the 2012 double Grammy winner and R&B performer, record producer and hip-hop impresario.

The entertainment media have worked themselves into a frenzy over how Shakira and Usher will fit into the program’s vocal mix, but Daly suggests the media have it backwards.

The Voice has touched a nerve with a young, educated, upwardly mobile, fast-growing following precisely because it has a casual, “who cares?” attitude toward stars and stardom.

When Daly initially agreed to sign on, he felt the program’s vibe — but he never believed it would catch on the way it has.

“We knew the juxtaposition of having famous musicians and then shifting the power to the contestant would be an interesting dynamic,” Daly recalled.

The Voice is unique in that, during the initial auditions phase, the contestants choose who among the mentors they think is best for them.

“With so many of these shows, the viewer sees the performer perform and then somebody high and mighty, sitting there in their chair, goes, ‘You’re worthy. You’re not worthy.’ Almost like at the gates of heaven. ’You can come in. You can’t come in.’

Cassadee Pope, left, with Avril Lavigne.

“We never believed that talent can be found like that, or even should be found like that. We found four people who were relevant, who had done big things in music, who respect each other and who want to help people.

“The Voice was about us as producers putting really great talent in front of them and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think, what can you do to really help them?’”

Daly considers himself well-versed musically, but the program has introduced him to artists he says left him frankly “blown away,” that he otherwise might not have heard except by accident. The same is true, he suspects, of many of the viewers who tuned in to The Voice each week and made it not just a TV ratings hit but a cultural phenomenon.

Daly became emotionally invested in many of the performers last season — hosts who insist they remain objective and above the fray are either lying, deluding themselves or frankly clueless, he says with disarming candour — and he freely admits the singers who grab him the most are the creative, unusual artists.

Cassadee Pope, last season’s winner, is exceedingly talented, with a one-of-a-kind voice and keen musical ear, he says, but it was the weird, strangely out-of-the-box artists like gruff, Saint Paul, Minn., folksinger Nicholas David Mrozinski, a.k.a. Nicholas David, and 16-year-old soul diva Melanie Martinez who jumped out at Daly as being the genuine article.

A season earlier, it was another shy teen, 15-year-old Chula Vista, Calif., native Xenia — so shy she could barely speak on camera — whose performances on The Voice caught the eye of Justin Bieber and Avril Lavigne, so much so that they listed Xenia among their respective favourites lists on YouTube. Lavigne appeared on The Voice to perform a duet alongside eventual winner Pope in December’s live finale.

“Xenia, Melanie Martinez, Nicholas David — these people are the exceptions to the rule,” Daly said. “They’re not like Cassadee Pope or some of the popular artists out there. They’re left of centre. They’re the ones who have a hard time getting noticed. Yet they’re the ones, like Norah Jones, who go on to win Grammys.

Nicholas David, left, and Melanie Martinez.

“There’s something special about their voice, the purity of their craft. These are things that in 2012 or 2013 are hard to convey in prime time on a network. And The Voice is able to do that. I see it as the David and Goliath of music. I have an affinity for David.”

Daly sees his role as being the person at a cocktail party whom everyone wants to talk to, regardless of awkward situations or potential confrontations.

“During the live shows I have an earpiece, obviously, so people are constantly communicating. Other than that, I’m just a ballplayer. When I watch with my friends, if they go, ‘It’s easy!’ I know I’ve done my job. People say to me, ‘What do you do exactly? What’s your job?’ Well, if I look like I’m working, if it looks like work, then I’m not doing my job. There’s a lot of moving parts they don’t know, and my job is to make sure they don’t know.”

Daly says the secret to being a successful host is to be a human being, pure and simple.

“You don’t turn it on for the cameras, and then turn it off when they’re not around. When entire families are watching you on TV, that’s a privilege. You owe it to them to be who you are. You want them to feel comfortable. Nobody wants to come to this for a bad experience. I look for the human moments. That’s not a hosting skill; that’s a human skill.”

Cassadee Pope, left, Nicholas David, Melanie Martinez, Amanda Brown.

Daly says the one thing viewers might not guess about The Voice is how close the musician-mentors are off-camera.

“When the cameras are off, the coaches, the production staff, myself, our families are very tight. We all started this journey together in the beginning not really liking these types of shows, but we all formed close relationships along the way. I think people will be happy to know there’s a real family feel to this. It’s come to mean a great deal to me personally, and frankly I hadn’t expected that.”

The Voice returns Monday, March 24 on CTV Two and NBC at 8 ET/PT, 9 MT.

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile